Attack Of The Movies: Battle: Los Angeles

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There’s a bunch of ALIENS DESTROYING THE EARTH movies coming up this year, about which I couldn’t be more pleased. Who cares how stupid they are, when there’s ALIENS DESTROYING THE EARTH? (Unless it’s ID4, and then yes, of course, I care how stupid it is. I’m not deranged.) One of these films is Battle: Los Angeles, and the trailer looks seventy-six kinds of (dumb) awesome. And last night it was announced that there’s to be a game for it. There’s a few reasons to think this may not be the usual shovelware.

To start with, it’s being published by Konami, and developed by Saber Interactive. That’s the team that produced the interesting but flawed TimeShift. Second, it’s not being spammed across all formats, from GameBoy Color to iPhone. It’s coming out as a download only on XBLA, PSN and Steam. I’m not sure why that gives me confidence in it, but it does.

Beyond that, we don’t know a huge amount. Which is a bit lame, since it’s coming out in April (with the film released next week). Konami says,

“Players will have the opportunity to relive the thrill of the movie as they assume the role of Corporal Lee Imlay [Will Rothhaar’s character in the film] and fight alongside characters from the film and defend the city of Los Angeles from attacks from unknown forces.”

Then they draw breath and say that it’s,

“a high-end fast and frantic first-person shooter game that will take players through a single player campaign that mirrors the upcoming feature film. Players will assume the role of a Marine fighting against a worldwide alien invasion that has the city of Los Angeles as the major battleground and focal point for the game. Players will battle unique and varied enemies, using an arsenal of weapons throughout the game like an assault rifle, sniper rifle, rocket launcher, frag grenades, and a turret gun as they navigate the streets of Los Angeles avoiding fierce and relentless attacks. Aside from high-caliber fire fighting combat, destructible environments have been included using the Havok Destruction Module, which will allow players to destroy scaffolding structures, vehicles and overpasses to eliminate enemy forces.”

Unfortunately the berks haven’t accompanied this announcement with either a proper website or trailer, so this has to do.

Being able to ‘accidentally’ blow up large buildings with a single stray shot, or level entire city blocks with a quick salvo in the name of protecting the world from armies of enormous bugs trumps standard alien invasions any day of the week.

I’d had strong doubts about EDF:IA, being by a third-party studio, but most of them have evaporated with those videos. My only fear now is that it’s going to be a little too fast and twitchy. The pace of the combat definitely looks faster and snappier there. I liked the slow and lumbering feel of the B-movie monsters and lazily wobbling spaceships before.

Yeah, not quite as many enemies revealed so far – that’s something that all of Sandlots games seem to have in common: They know the limits of their engine. They just go beyond them – to hell with framerate, slowdown is acceptable if there’s 100+ giant monsters on screen at once. Fingers crossed they’re just saving that for later.

That, and the big alien robots don’t bounce around like they’re made of lollipop sticks and rubber bands when shot anymore. I miss that.

There’s actually two sequels in the works, and a PSP port/update of one of the PS2 games in development as well. All are by the original developers, Sandlot.. except for this, which is being farmed out to the studio responsible for the Matt Hazzard games, which is mainly why I’m skeptical/cautious.

Minor quibble:
This is a PC gaming site, why not post links to trailers that don’t need apple software to run? (All of the content is there on youtube, too. I’d say there are more people that have flash installed than quicktime.)

I don’t think that’s a very healthy attitude. The PC is often shunned in favor of consoles and you feel okay just dismissing Macs? I don’t like the OS or company all that much either but computers are computers. Stop being so immature.

It’s a movie that celebrates human-beings kicking tentaclely ass and how awesome kicking things that may not have asses in the ass is. It’s absolutely shameless about it and it has never been surpassed.

Independence day was a fine allegory for American arrogance. Just view the aliens as a metaphor for foreign culture and there you have it. People the world over wiping away their tears as America unites to protect them (from themselves).

What I think would be really awesome would be a subtler alien invasion movie. They invade, but in a sneaky, insidious way that requires small special ops teams rather than hundreds of marines, and tanks, and airstrikes. There’d be a lot more mystery as to the nature of the aliens, and the viewer wouldn’t conveniently have all their questions answered. It might actually make the alien invasion concept scary again.

Basically, Signs without the pseudo-religious subplot and tacked-on emotional baggage and with more guys in balaclavas exploring mysterious locations at night.

So Saber Interactive are going the same way as Grin then? I suppose that’s not surprising. I liked Timeshift. But it was deja vu central and I don’t think that’s down to the time travelling. They’re not a bad developer by any means. But they have never made the big time and to be honest I was surprised to hear they’re still going at all.

I’m pretty pleased about the recent flood of alien invasion media, considering I just released an invasion novel late last year. If Battle: Los Angeles and Falling Skies turn out to be any good, I think it’ll be a great time to be in the saucers-and-rayguns business. :)

Can’t say I’m particularly optimistic about this game, though. Between being a budget release and a movie adaptation, there’s something of a foul odor to overcome. Worth keeping an eye on though, and I’m looking forward to some footage before I judge.

I have no expectations at all of this Battle: LA game. Games like these almost always fail miserably and after the destruction of the Tron IP by that shamefully failed second Tron game I have given up hope for movie spin offs completely (I can’t begin to explain how disappointed I was by that game). I’m sure it will be unimaginative boring cliche stacked on unimaginative boring cliche with bad game mechanics in a game that lasts about 4 hours. These gaming miscreants slowly but surely erode the trust in the gaming industry and my willingness to spent money on games in general. What a waste. What are they thinking when they dump their distasteful products on us gamers? I’ve almost entirely stopped buying games at full price because I have learned to completely distrust everything that is sold to my as a game these days. A stack of about 30 games, I bought in the last year, is sitting there next to my PC and only one of them I bought at full price. Most of them did not set me back more than 10 euro. And the one I payed full price for I regret. Not because it is a bad game, but because of the way the people responsible misbehave with their DLC policy.

This sounds like you get to choose from machine gun, machine gun and machine gun and throw a grenade.
And while that, it looks like you will only ever to be able to carry one main gun and maybe a sidearm.

Wanna bet?

In turn, that’s not awesome, mindboggling or superduper action, but more of the same old “one gun to bore them all” approach to shooting shit up, rather than “here’s a world of choice, GO NUTS! Switch to your hearts content. Shotgun the baddie, snipe the tower shooter, autofire on the horde, bazooka the hulk..all in the same 30 seconds.”.